Book Review: The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell

Colin Steele

It’s an increasing practice in publishing that best-selling authors, to raise money for their favourite charities, will allow a reader to pay to be named as a minor character in a forthcoming book.

It comes as a complete surprise, however, to find famous author, Neil Gaiman, featuring, not only as a character but also as a major, and rather dark character, in Paul Cornell’s The Severed Streets. Cornell has said that even his copy editor double-checked with him that Gaiman had given permission to be featured: “Neil read through all the passages he's in (don't hold him responsible for any he's not), and gave us his blessing”.

The Severed Streets, the second in Cornell's "Shadow Police" series, after London Falling, depicts a London, torn by economic and social discord, with “flash mobs” rioting on the streets.

Acoalition government struggles to keep order, not helped by the machinations of a powerful Murdochian newspaper tycoon, who obtains government leaks before all of his rivals.

When a cabinet minister is murdered, within his locked government car, in the manner of the Jack the Ripper murders, no one, including his driver, sees how it happened. Detective Inspector Quill’s specialist Scotland Yard unit, with the ability, “the Sight”, to see the supernatural, is called in. When more gruesome murders of “rich white males” occur, Quill's team follow a path that will lead them into literally hellish situations.

There are thematic links here, not only to Gaiman’s Neverwhere series, but also to China Mieville’s alternate London stories. Gaiman’s character actually provides a synopsis of versions of Neverwhere and “a hidden London”. This allows Cornell's book, in his words, to be “more a sort of psycho-geography, about how memory and place creates myth”.

Cornell’s inventive occult horror has elements of Dennis Wheatley, but his gritty police procedural settings render the supernatural more plausible than Wheatley’s now largely forgotten best sellers. The Severed Streets mixes London myths, secret cabals, a power-hungry press mogul, Neil Gaiman, London East End criminal twins and a complex murder mystery into an intriguing and inventive whole.